Magnalon's got it. The only thing "hard" about Demon's Souls is the fact that it throws you out there with no guidance after 1-1, where you might accidentally stumble into an area that is too hard for a beginner player. Past that, it's all about learning patterns like in Megaman; once you know enemy patterns you can essentially complete the game blindfolded.

the void is awful as a game because if you fuck up at all in your resource management you will be screwed an hour or two later, and there's nothing you can do to fix it. No game should do that to you. Mission objectives are also impossibly vague sometimes as well. Atmospheric-wise its awesome tho

For me the type of difficulty you're talking about almost approaches the concept of opacity as a sort of meta-game, as if part of the game itself lies in testing the user's deductive/adaptive skills in deciphering the rules and objectives of the game they've been inserted into.

Combine that with a sense of risk as with Demon's Souls, and it makes for a really affecting and unnerving experience that some people just... seek out, and others run away from it.

To answer your question though, I don't think the two can be extricated; that feeling of immersed vulnerability is in large part a function of the obscurity of what you need to do to survive. If you remove the opacity, you remove a large component of that experience.

There's a distinct difference between the immersion you feel when admiring a ridiculously detailed environment just for the sheer wonder of being in a foreign place (Uncharted 2), and the immersion you feel when you need to decipher the meaning of that same landscape to stay alive (Demon's Souls). I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the minute you take away the obscure "you're on your own" mentality, the experience of wonder and immersion becomes more like the former than the latter.

Easy games don't give a sense of accomplishment like hard games do because they are more likely to stick you with a main character that is badass but won't challenge your ability to be a badass player with this character. survival horror games almost take an easy route by making you play as someone who was never meant to be a badass to begin with, so changes are you will feels a sense of accomplishment by the end of the game, if the game is any good. I think hard games operate with the opposite formula; they give you the badass main character but they also give you hard enemies so that they can show you the main character being a bad ass in cut-scenes but in gameplay its up to you as the player to make sure this person keeps his/her badassness while you go through the game. This theory makes sense to me, it would explain the obsession that action game designers seem to have with telling you how well you are doing and grading your gameplay in action games.

@Anthony

I wasn't trying to make a point that I am good at the Void because I am super-awesome, I just planed everything to a ridiculous extend, and my playthrough was probably 40% longer then the average one, which dosn't really show of my skills, just my nature of over calculating things, and to be fair, it's not THAT hard, the only thing I was really AFRAID of in the game was the bosses (not just the brothers), because the fights were tedious as hell (ok maybe it did have SOME flaws in that regard), but I don't think it was just the fear of the battle itself, the first time I saw a brother I nearly jumped from my chair.
Weirdly enough, I did get some feeling of acomplishment, not for beating the game per-se, but by seeing my resources beeing spent as planed (yeah, think I'm a freak in that regard)

Still want to try out Pathologic, even thou the developers admited to having made some poor design choices; even thou the game was soposed to be hard, they didn't meant for it to be unfair.

Someone here mentioned Call of Cthulu, yeah, I think that entire game you were soposed to have a "oh fuck a..." emotion, and it succeded briliantly, also Cryostasis (highly recomended) worked very well in that regard also, you feared every battle, not because the enemies were frighting themselves, it was because your character was so fragile and so clumsy at handling firearms you were in constant fear of... well, dying!

@ran24, yes the mission objectives were a bit vague sadly, I found myself fast forwarding a couple of times, just to see what happend if I did this, and this, and this, and maybe get more clues as to what I was soposed to be doing

@imthatotherdude - well of course I realize this. And I wouldn't want to compare an RPG to the Void or Deamon's Souls. I just want to point out that some games allow you to play to your personal difficulty better than others... so I could have spent a bunch of time grinding and leveling, but instead I chose to challenge myself.

Also, your math is way off... the Co-Op version just sends more and stronger enemies to attack you. For two players who routinely play FPS on the highest difficulty this was a challenge (and don't discount that you dick :P). In other words two lvl 10s doing a lvl 10 mission = medium difficulty.

Penumbra, perhaps?
It's scary as hell, the story is really intense, and the whole atmosphere is really dense and strange. But it's not too easy, as in it doesn't tell you exactly what to do, and the tension, at least for me, kinda keeps me from thinking straight, so there are a few moments where you're building up the tension for so long that the only thing on your mind when something happens is OH FUCK RUN.
This idea of making the player fuck up and do something unexpected out of pure fear and tension kinda balances it out, I guess.
I mean, if your balls are huge then you probably won't get scared. But I was, and it made me mess up my decisions throughout the game. Like, I would run in the wrong direction, or make a noise and something would notice me.
What I want to say is: it's not a difficult game by itself, it's difficulty relies on the player's tension and fear.
Am I making any sense?

To an extent, all these sandbox-style games championing freedom and experimentation have also diminished challenge. On one hand, I like that there isn't always just one way to beat a boss, but if you can beat a game and never really learn the system and all its potentials, then the game designer has failed.

I think there are some things the game shouldn't just jump out and tell you. You know how the harder Zelda games usually just tutor you through the first item again and then don't give you and sort of hint on what you're supposed to do with other items? You're just supposed to figure it out. Wind Waker and Twilight Princess make it patently obvious, but Majora's Mask and Spirit Tracks are far more obscure. Even the "hint" markers in ST are often just puzzles themselves. So you doodle out what you think is the answer, try out what you think is the solution and the result is quite satisfying.

Making a puzzle intuitive, challenging and satisfying is rather different from real-time action, though, especially in an RPG context. Stuff in Morrowind was determined by dice rolls and no matter how many times that swork looked like it connected, you missed because of the dice roll.

SMT: Nocturne's second boss, Matador, is a ball-buster. He's a brick wall. And yet, he can be overcome. He's not there to frustrate you so much as drive home that the game's approach at exploiting weaknesses and gaining turns is not just about offense, but defense as well. If you make no preparation for defense he'll just destroy you every time.

With Matador, its not that the game hasn't told you about how to win this fight, but it doesn't come out and say it either. They just hoped you'd figure out that what applies to enemies can also apply to you. The game gives you unparalleled freedom in what kind of party members and skills you want to have for you and them alike, but it takes great lengths to make you learn how to adapt to its world and its not going to wait for you to catch up.

So long as the guidelines are there, as with Zelda:ST or Nocturne, I can accept a harsh challenge. When I don't consider those guidelines, I just lose because I'm being a moron.

I also think memorization is rather important, if only because past encounters can teach you things about future encounters. Like if this wind-aligned enemy is weak to lightning, that might mean others are, too. Its not always true, but always worth a try.

Ikaruga. Hard: Yes. Simple: Dodge and shoot. Tense: Yes.

Nethack. Hard: Yes. Simple: Arguably. There's very few commands but they can be applied in very unique ways. Tense: Yes, (BTW it sounds like Pathologic adopts the Roguelike hunger system, if not, what's different?)

I tried to come up with a fancy explanation as to why neutering the difficulty in The Void would destroy the atmosphere and feelings you get from the game. I realized, however, that such a task would be far too much writing for an article comment so instead I will compare it's difficulty to another game you mentioned, Demon Souls. In Demon Souls the difficulty (despite being completely ridiculous in my opinion as it relies on memorization and flat out luck) merely gives you a sense of accomplishment every time you clear a level or beat a boss. This happens in any game mind you but it is amplified so much more by the fact that the game is brutal and unforgiving. If Demon Souls did not have this difficulty and was instead a simple hack and slash where you aren't necessarily in danger much of the time you would realize that it is otherwise a bland game with many ancient, unpolished game mechanics. The Voids difficulty serves an entirely different purpose in my opinion as you don't really feel too accomplished every time you survive an attack by a brother but instead feel glad by the fact that you are still alive. The difficulty simply put is another tool used to enhance the atmosphere and story of a world in which you have no idea what is going on and could die at any moment.
This probably doesn't make much sense as I don't want to get too far in depth but to be quite honest the difficulty is what makes these games. To take that away would be to take away a key component of what makes these games what they are.

its one thing for a game to be hard but its another thing for a game to be unfairly hard.

difficulty levels will have you playing and experiencing a game in a entirely different way. you mentioned it yourself anthony in your previous rants about playing farcry with one life and how you finally enjoyed metal gear 3 when playing on the hardest difficulty.

but when difficulty becomes a extremely unfair and cheap with the player having pretty much no option to succeed then it becomes a problem.

I'm actually playing Pathologic now, I'm on day 11 with the Bachelor. It has been a long road. Personally for me the game isn't that difficult, but all the same the set up of the game places a ton of pressure on the player. There's nothing quite like being stranded in an infected district, low on immunity and about to starve to death, while simultaneously having to cross the entirety of town to speak to one person so that the town doesn't die. It's moments like that make the game awesome. I also don't feel that in the end a sense of victory has to be felt for the game to be good. I still haven't finished Pathologic and I have immense doubts whether the town will survive at all, despite both a vaccine and panacea having been found. I could go into the philosophy of it (finitude makes things important) but that would just be pretentious.

I feel like it dose have to be difficult to gain that accomplishment. The main problem is that games are to often made difficult simply by increasing amount of punishment for a mistake.

I would much rather play something that is difficult not because it takes 2 hours and no mistakes (Demon's soul's) but because something is difficult to figure out or understand (Braid). If games would stop over punishing the player and disrespecting there time, then people might be more open to difficult games.

You ranted about Demon's Souls, which I wholeheartedly disagree with. =p

If by repetition you mean having to redo the level from the beginning, then yes. But the goal is to not die so, pay attention and don't die to avoid the need to go through the level again.

And that's where the fun comes from, succeeding in not dying. Because there are so many ways to approach the game, you do what you want to do.

I prefer light melee (equipped weight under half of your Equip Burden) with a very offensive oriented weapon. It is arguably the hardest way to play the game (seeing how you need to be in death's range in order to attack your foes) but I find the payoff to be well worth it.

I hear archer styles do very well, due to the distance in between you and your target. But I ended up deleting my mage because casters have a stupidly easy time playing through the game. It was offensive if not because the game became so easy at that point.

Though to each their own. I understand exactly what you're saying though, I just started playing EVE and god-fucking-dammit the interface and sheer amount of tutorials you need to do before you can truly understand the game and what you can do in it are staggering.

I already tried and quit EVE before, but this time around I have friends who are playing it and through their trial and error, we have "figured out" EVE's deal. Now it is worthwhile enough for me to go through that extreme un-approachability because the prize (gameplay) at the end is enticing enough to want to get there.

Vanilla Gorilla:
I get that your whole goal in Demon's Souls is to learn the ins and outs of each level to prevent your death, but that just doesn't appeal to me. I'm much more interested in games that require you to learn the mechanics and enhance your skill through expanding your understanding of those mechanics (Ikaruga, for instance) rather than ones that just boil down to something like rote memorization.

Loophole Jumper:
"to cut on Demon's Souls for the fact that it does take some memorization and repetition is not a fair point"

Of course it is.

You're making a huge oversimplification by acting as if all rewardingly difficult games necessitate rote memorization. They don't.

You're ignoring an enormous amount of hugely difficult games that DON'T revolve around memorization and practicing the same levels over again: Ikaruga, Pathologic, The Void. The world of Demon's Souls had nothing to do with my distaste toward it (actually, I absolutely adore the game's atmosphere). Like I said to Vanilla Gorilla, I just don't have any interest in games that try to wring their value out of forcing the player to memorize level layouts and enemy attack patterns when a game like The Void is, for all its flaws, difficult in ways that expand the player's understanding of the game rules and the overarching strategies they need to succeed, where the player's approach is constantly changing and mutating in unexpected ways as more of the game's subtleties are revealed (or, as is often unfortunately the case, figured out via GameFAQs).

Then again, you did previously say that there's no essential difference between the designs of World of Goo and Uncharted, so it's not terribly surprising that you'd continue to make myopic generalizations.

1) Wow. These ads are crippling. I had to re-try watching the video three times because the ads got stuck.

2) The only thing you need to memorize in Demon's Souls is A: always make sure your current equip burden is less than half of the max and B: press a direction + circle button everytime an enemy is about to hit you. Seriously, the dodging breaks the game. Even if you get hit while dodging, you are invincible while dodging. It honestly makes the game too easy, so long as you can time dodges well enough.

Shadow of the colossus is a pretty good answer to your querry.

@Master Fooz:
Have you even played Demon's Souls? Firstly, memorization yes, but "flat out luck"? Could you elaborate?

Secondly, it also gives you sense of accomplishment when you gain a level or spell, find that piece of ore you needed to upgrade your weapon etc, etc. Besides, I didn't think the sense of accomplishment when you beat a boss is the game's biggest draw. Ultimately, what keeps you coming back even after dying countless times is thinking "If I do this and that differently next time, I can make it". This only works because the game is almost never unfair and when you die, it's usually your own fault.

And lastly, the game is far from a "simple hack and slash". The combat requires a lot of tactics, rationing your stamina etc. In a way, most "hack and slash" games are simple because they're easy enough to let you get away with button mashing. Usually, it's "run into a group of enemies, press the attack button a couple times and chances are you'll come out mostly unharmed". Due to Demon's Souls' difficulty, it forces you to learn the intricacies of the combat and use them to your advantage. Basically, you could say it uses difficulty as a game mechanic.

In thinking about balancing difficulty as a source of desperation adrenaline with intuitive gameplay, I kept coming back to Penumbra Overture. For me the gameplay is hard, but each challenge is eventually surpassed with patience. I was forced many times to come up with new techniques within the game mechanics to avoid being wolf dinner. Red functions as one of the most intriguing and complex "guides" in any game I have played, while still keeping the player from becoming lost (or lonely). The game breaks up survival horror and exploration into a nice rhythmic beat, yet I can really enjoy the hostile environment I've been placed in when I'm seconds away from death (hiding behind boxes listening to wolves imagining what i taste like). This might be the blend of game your looking for if the difficulty was a little higher (assuming I'm as bad at penumbra as I think I am). I defiantly felt accomplished while playing it, but that's just me.

@Anthony Burch

I just want to check and make sure we agree that level memorization is a huge part of Ikaruga. You can survive just on knowledge of mechanics but you can't wring a proper high score out of that game without memorizing every inch of those levels and executing a pre-planned strategy to perfection.

Ikaruga does revolve around memorization and practicing the same levels over again. That's one of the things I don't like about it. If you try to chain Ikaruga is all about memorization.

Also, @Anthony:
Since when was Ikaruga not about memorizing levels? I don't get it.

Also, I felt the memorization in Demon's Souls enhanced the atmosphere. In most other games, the atmosphere slowly peels away once you get really deep into the game mechanics, but for me, having to know every nook and cranny in Demon's Souls' world was what made it so memorable.

Games where you can simply rush through can be fun, no doubt about it, but they often don't stay with you for a long time after playing them. For instance, I enjoyed Uncharted, but I remember relatively little of it. It was over before I really could immerse myself into its world and its gorgeous environments.

i cant comment about Demon's Souls, but i have played through the Bachelor's game in Pathologic (want to play through the rest, but waiting for that new english translation), and i'm some distance into The Void.

i think some people (not Anthony) are missing the point about the particular *kind* of difficulty in something like the Void or Pathologic... it's not a matter of difficulty in your typical sort of game, like a fps or whatever. both of those games are, far more than fights (which do exist in both), about *survival* more than anything - making sure you dont starve (including "planting" and harvesting colour properly in The Void), get sick, die from exhaustion, etc... and it's the sort of difficulty which is often not telegraphed in an *extremely* obvious fashion.

but, while this might piss me off for certain games... Ice Pick Lodge's games, it kind of makes sense to have it in there - it seems almost integral to the story and atmosphere to have these in, as the central theme of these two games is to survive in especially difficult circumstances. they kind of require a death or two outright (especially this was the case for me in The Void), but when you figure out the rules of the world, when the game pounds into your head that (unlike in many other games) resources are scarce, you start to learn how to deal with things much better. i found Pathologic to be quite difficult early in, but after a few days passed, i'd figured out a routine that kept me going pretty well till the end (it was still a somewhat grueling experience, but one which was so intricately intermingled with the plot of the game, i'm hard pressed to say it wasnt at least *partly* warranted).

it's all the more impressive, in the sense that it really does manage to pound home the importance of your actions, and forces all sorts of quandaries onto you which, for most other games, wouldnt be much of an issue (since, say, being generous is never a problem for gameplay purposes in most games - look at the shallow moral choice of killing or saving the Sisters in Bioshock, which really doesnt matter at all).

i'd say, if the difficulty is done in a particular way, and it melds with the story/atmosphere/etc in a sensible manner (rather than just being pointlessly crushing), then it's warranted. and it seems warranted for Ice Pick Lodge's games, to me... for more reasons than i stated, i think, but i'm going on too long.

ps: Anthony, if you're really worried about stuff like mission objectives in Pathologic, i *would* recommend dipping into the official walkthrough, if you havent already - survival is still important, but at least you're able to have a bit of peace of mind to know that you didnt possibly make a decision that destroyed yourself. the walkthrough is linked to at the bottom of the wikipedia article on the game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathologic

ps2: anyone having a hell of a time early in The Void, one of the most important things i could tell you is... when you get a second (and third etc etc) heart, and they tell you to fill them all up with colour... DONT. when you get tons more colour later in the game, you can start doing this, but early on, you'll want to conserve your colour consumption as much as you can, and having multiple hearts filled will actually drain colour out of *all* of those hearts simultaneously when you're on the map screen. just fill up as few of your hearts as is warranted in your situation (which, very early on, is generally only one). and be careful about using amber, since it makes everything drain much faster. ... and there's a bunch of other bits of advice i could give, but nevermind that now.

@Anthony,

You said you hadn't felt a true sense of desperation in-game until The Void. What makes this true for The Void and not your no-death Far Cry 2 playthrough? Was it purely the difficulty, or was it more about the objectives, mechanics, atmosphere, etc...?

Going out of demon's souls for a bit

What you want is exactly what Company Of Heroes did it for me, bear in mind that the game is not by any means easy, but i played it without failing once. The thing one thing i can actually say that it did quite right is that the game made me believe that it was difficult without actually being hard at all. During the first two missions you can't actually die, the game keeps giving you troops if you lose some, but the cutscenes, voice acting and sound of the game makes you believe that you are in a real. This may not be a direct game mechanic, but it trigger the "tense" factor because of a few things:

First one is achieving suspension of disbelief and then making you believe that death IS a real threat(through disbelief), a few games like demon's souls or Diablo hardcore mode takes this to the next step, making a significant impact on gameplay, Company of heroes did it for me the same way Plants Vs, Zombies did it for you: I always had to adapt and think of nem strategies, and wasn't always sure if what i was doing was going to work at all, with that fear of failure in game becomes a real emotion.

If you've read about psychology of desires and gameplay correlations, you know that acts that fulfill urges are the key to fun, so, by making the gamer feel afraid you create the urge to protect yourself, and by fulfilling this urge, you are relieved and satisfied with the game.

What i'm trying to point is that the game doesn't need to be difficult, you just need to really fear losing it, maybe because you will lose your save, maybe because you will lose your souls, maybe because it will cost you another quarter in the arcade

But i'm starting to drag here, i'll just leave this blog post as it explains a lot about this psychology

[link]http://platinumgames.com/2009/07/17/the-method-of-fun/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PlatinumGames+%28PlatinumGames+Inc.%29&utm_content=Google+Reader[/link]

I would love to keep this discussion going on, so Anthony and anyone who wants to discuss this, PLEASE PM me, as i probably won't be checking this comments after tomorrow

blog post with link working

http://platinumgames.com/2009/07/17/the-method-of-fun/

Demon's Souls is only about memorization for learning the few traps or sneak attack sections. Past that, it's actually very skill based for learning how to best utilize your character build to deal with enemies, and there are a variety of builds you can use to do so. Most people never get this far in understanding the game however, as it doesn't even tell you half the moves your character has available to them. You have a combo sequence, heavy strike, running attack, roll attack, and dodge attack, many of which have very different versions depending if you are using the weapon on handed or two handed, giving you about 10 attacks for each weapon type, plus proper use of blocking, parrying, dodging and backstabs. And that's not even including applications of magic and bows.

So yes, Demon's Souls is very much about learning to use and expand your skills once you learn more how to play the game. It's certainly infinitely more satisfying than your average action RPG.

Mass Effect is an easy game. The difference between the difficulties isn't much. Anthony is referring to extreme cases such as STALKER. There comes a point in the game that you can not go back, radiation ends up with you in seconds if you are not well equipped with stock of items. But you can't go back and buy more. It's that point where you have to load a save from 5-10 hours ago. I don't remember having to go back 15 min. in Mass Effect (or Uncharted, Cod ,...).

What is not surprising. For obvious reasons this type of difficulty no longer exists in mainstream games.

While an interesting and intriguing rant (or more like an observation), I didn't really agree with the idea that difficulty can be the reason a game is good. I've always in a believer in that fine line between "challenge" and "difficulty." I couldn't for the life of me understand WHY you would want to play a games like these, ones that are balls-hard and frustrating, until the last text about seeing sad movies.

I can get really into a movie even if I know beforehand it's sad as shit, and I know what it's like trying to get friends to watch them because you do have to make that argument "Yes, it's sad, but sooo good!" With that analogy now in my mind, I'm a little bit more open-minded towards these difficult games. I might be downloading The Void soon on your recommendation.

@ imthatotherdude
Pardon my stupid.

I see your point, Anthony, but you got it a bit wrong about Pathologic or The Void. Probably 'wrong' is not the term, you got a little confused mixing up the difficulty of the game itself and a feel that it has to it. In some ways they're connected, but it's not the point with Pathologic or The Void.

Just a few years ago I realized what russian art is about, be it music, cinema, literature or whatever. It's morose, obscure and desperate, but at the same time it's sad and beautiful in a way. It's also psychedelic, but at the same time it's dark. That's because of roots in slavic mythology and paganism, probably. Check out Vrubel's paintings. And Tarkovsky's films, if you still haven't. Like 'Stalker' or 'Mirror'. You'll see what I'm talking about.

So that desperation you've felt playing those games, just like I did, when you felt like a concrete wall fell on you, it's not because they're difficult or something like that, that's the essence of russian art. What Icepick Lodge achieved with these two titles is truly amazing. Art has no boundaries indeed.
Keep up the good work, man.

I don't mind when a game is "hard" so long as it is "hard" in the correct way, I cannot tell you how many times I have stopped playing a game or used a cheat because I would get to a point in a game where some stupid platforming shows up in a level that requires me to make a jump and I try to do it for a good 2 hours before I give up- same goes with games that require you to press some random little button that you can barely see hidden under a rock or some crap and walk around for hours trying to figure out what to do- that is the line between making a game challenging and making it irritating

I think you're a Nazi difficulty Sympathiser.

Also, Contra.

in response to whormongr, mostly:

That's just the trick, really. 'Hard in the correct way.' Of course, this means different things to different people. I'm with you in that I utterly hate pixel-timed platforming, but all those Asshole Mario games have a cult following. Those moments in MW2 that required you to stick your neck out and ended up killing you 83902 times infuriated me, (such as the safehouse escape with roach/ghost) but I loved the strategized, contemplative obscurity that drove the difficulty in The Void. A lot of people are quite the opposite. Fulfilling all, or even the majority, of people's expectations regarding correct difficulty may not even be possible.

The only workable solution seems to be in difficulty settings. Not so much in the sense of simple enemy/damage scaling, but settings with some real effort put into them. If The Void had an easier play mode that gave more information on the mechanics and was less punishing, both types of people could have their way.

I'd argue that silent hill might be able to do what you're saying. If I've interpreted the rant correctly then I believe you're saying that you're looking for a game that creates the sense of tension because you're going to die followed by the euphoria created when you're safe and have succeeded. But it needs to do this without being retardedly difficult. The Silent Hill games have you run around as a non combatant in a town filled with swarms of monsters from hell. Shattered memories does this best since you're completely unarmed. Even if you're on full health, EVERYTHING poses a credible threat to your life. While it doesn't do it in the same way as The Void and others I think it achieves somewhat of the same effect without the difficulty actually being that bad.

Interesting rant.

I personally hated the difficulty in Mega Man 9 because it was just sort of obnoxious and unjustified, but I liked it in Cave Story because there had been a great difficulty curve all the way through the game and there was a decent story payoff for beating hell.

Karoshi 2.0 stood out for me in this sense because some of the puzzles in that were really quite mean. But in every one of them there was a bizzare sense of logic, and once you sort of tuned in to it, solving the puzzles was pretty much the best thing in the world. It always made you feel really clever for solving them, even if all you had to do was press a button on the keyboard or walk off the screen or just stand perfectly still or something.

I'd like to see more games with good puzzles in them.

I did a quick Cmd+F thing here and noticed that seemingly no one mentioned Dead Space. I think this is a game that can almost successfully harmonize the crushing difficulty with the accessibility thing while still giving options to the player on how to tackle the challenges.

I mean, when you're in a strange corridor with some sticky gooey scary alien organic matter covering the walls, and you're listening to strange noises and voices, and you only have a small and a medium medpack, you still have four weapons to choose from, but you have no idea which kind of furious alien will jump on your face, you still don't know how many of them will come to you at once or which kind of them will show up. You only know that one small and one medium medpack will not be NEARLY enough if you encounter two or more at the same time.

So, you are terrified because you can actually die every time you walk close by a ventilation opening or something.

The one thing that kind of diminishes this fear in you is knowing that you won't come back from the last save point if you die, but from the last checkpoint, which is inevitably much much closer to where you are now. But still, I don't wanna die.

I wanna be that guy is hard because pretty much anything can kill you (good), things that you have no idea are there will kill you in under a second (bad), it's got invisible platforms that it gives no clue to where they are (bad) and insane pixel perfect jump/fall sections (good) so it's basically a game of memorization.

Another game to look at is Baroque for the Wii (better) and ps2. You are literally thrown into a world that you do not know about other then the back story in the manual. An angel hands you a gun and tells you to kill a corrupt god in a tower. After that you have to figure everything out for your self. From how to fight enemies, to their weaknesses, to even the little bits of the story to understand what is going on. As you get more comfortable you end up trying new things like throwing items at people and learning something new about them or the item or an event may happen. Also the big theme is dying and you have to die to move on in the game at some points. Every time you die something new may have happened while you went in the dungeon. There is a practice dungeon but you have to explore town to find it first.

I do think the difficulty added to the game as you really feel like a helpless person who is randomly assigned a seemingly impossible task. As you get through out the game, you and the character understand how to survive and what is going on. Another game would be gothic 1 and 2 as you are a nameless prisoner who ends up exploring a world then never been in before. It is hard but you feel like you become stronger and understand the world you are in better. Final fantasy fables is also similar but probably not as hard as the ones listed. The game does easy you in but during the first three dungeons, they are like training you for the harder dungeons which require applying all you learn to survive. Unless you feel like leveling up enough where you can stomp through a dungeon. Opoona to the lesser extent can be like that if you don't try to level grind. You have to use strategy and speed to win the fights as you can only fight for a certain amount of time before collapsing in battle. all these games reward you with the feeling that you became stronger individual and the reward is being able to explore more and discover new things.

Contra. lol
But seriously, I have no idea. I love your Rev Rants dude. Keep up the great work. This and HAWP and the cast. Great work, sir.

You... you hate Demon's Souls? I don't think I can continue watching these videos anymore... oh god...

Pathologic and The Void are also both awesome.

@Anthony

I'd like to highlight an interesting synergy between what you said in the text, about the exploration in The Void as not being "real" exploration, to you, as it is entirely focused on necessty and involvement in the moment, and a comment by Mr eX to your Avatar article, wherein he details exploration as the opposite of immersion since the former precludes a break from the immediacy of the character's present circumstance. I'll put the quotes and link in my following post.

The reason I bring this up is to ask whether you feel exploration in games is only usually possible at the cost of immersion, as you seem to suggest when you write about The Void. In other words, the freedom we feel to stop and take in the scenery and look over here and walk over there is directly contrary to the pants-shitting experience of stumbling across a Death-Claw or running out of health items: in the latter experience, the player is forced into a course of action out of necessity and stripped of the choices of freedom (subconsciously, by himself), almost always involving a bonding of the player's feelings with those of the characters. This result is the powerful species of immersion that only games can give us.

Of course there are exceptions - Portal lets you explore to a very small, controlled extent, which goes to add onto the level of immersion; Far-Cry 2 lets you explore a huge map while in doing so the player discovers the game's narrative for themselves and so immersion in the plot is born from exploration. But let's exclude exceptions and look at the general rule. Given it's usually one or the other, which is more important to you, Anthony: immersion or exploration? I'm not trying to be a dick or catch you out or anything, I just want to hear your thoughts on the matter, if you have any.

Well, that is if you even read this, which is doubtful, but fuck it I'll put it out there.

"You technically do a lot of "exploring" in The Void, technically, yet it never really feels like "true" exploring since you're only visiting new areas out of a ravenous hunger for more Color. Hard to admire the scenery when you're starving to death."

"Exploring needlessly is the opposite of immersion, if you were truly immersed you would be in the mind set of the character you're playing. The only reason you would want to go explore something in a game is to find items which means you're constantly thinking "how can I make myself more bad ass" which means you're reminding yourself that you're playing a game. When you're immersed in a game you forget that you're playing you're playing a game."
Link?

I feel like I should comment on the actual topic because it's one that I'm quite interested in, but I don't have anything useful or insightful to say at the moment... I haven't played Demon's Souls or The Void or Pathologic. The only mentioned game that I have played is Batman: AA, and I take exception to the use of "intentionality" with regards to that game (probably due to a differing definition) but it's largely unimportant.

Does difficulty affect a game's quality? For me, Yes. That's not to say difficulty is a requisit for a game to be good, rather games I enjoy must challange me and put me in a position where I have to overcome an obstacle through effort. I do not want to play a game that has nothing new to offer. I expect this is the same for most people. Easy games, games that offer no challange, can go fuck themselves.

On the other hand, challanging does not equate to frustrating. Someone already said this, but the game must be difficult in such a way that my continuous failings are my own fault and not a result of an evil god who plucks bullets from the sky and puts them in my head. Like that fantastic God of Tetris video. Well, so long as I am the cause of my constant respawning, through inadequacy of skill or incompehension of game mechanics etc, I can easily tolerate a difficult game. But if I begin to decide my deaths were unfair and unavoidable, then the game gets coloured "bad" and is deserving of less of my time. Ultimately it's down to how I feel about it, but I think I've never been unreasonable and short-tempered in this regard.

For me, it has more to do with balancing a sense of drama due to consequence with the level of frustration. If I play Metal Slug, for example, with infinite continues, I lose interest because there isn't any tension or drama. I'm not frustrated, but I'm not really having any fun either. On the other hand, if a game's consequences for failure are so harsh that I decide the tension, drama, and/or reward for success aren't worth it, I'm also going to stop having fun.

What's currently driving me to keep playing The Void is the stuff I've seen in various videos about it. It looks drastically different to the bland expanses you start off in. It incredibly alluring. WHERE THE HELL IS ALL THAT STUFF? I need to know. So I keep playing and weird shit keeps happening.

I'm enjoying it...whatever it is.

Jumbo:
A fair point if we're talking about getting really huge high scores, but I'm talking about the most basic skills it takes to simply succeed (which is to say, finish) the game. Memorizing enemy layouts in Ikaruga is like learning to wavedash in Super Smash Bros Melee. Necessary if you wanna play on a really high, elite level, sure, but not at all necessary to being just plain decent at the game or enjoying it on a basic level.

I don't believe it's absolutely necessary to memorize level and enemy layouts to simply beat Ikaruga's campaign mode. I think it IS necessary in Demon's Souls.

altered:
I misspoke. I meant to say that I'd never played a game that successfully and intentionally effected those emotions. Far Cry 2 allows for the permadeath playthrough just due to the buddy mechanics and some other stuff, but that's not the initially *intended* way to play through the game. Not to diminish FC2 no death runs, of course; it's just that if I threw that out as an example of what I'm talking about, then it opens the floodgates for any sort of metagaming (running away from 1ups in Mario 64), which might have distracted from my initial question.

Byronic Man:
Admittedly, I may just be using an overly-reductive definition of exploration (hence the quotation marks around "true"); I tend to think of exploration as deriving pleasure or enlightenment from the world itself, and your ability to move through it. In other words, a situation in which the locale and your relationship to it is more important than the trinkets inside of it.

That said, I do not think exploration and immersion are diametrically opposed, or anything. The exploration in The Void doesn't seem "true" because I'm focusing on finding color and minimizing the amount of time I spend in every single locatio rather than examining the world. Conversely, the exploration in Myst feels entirely natural -- my desire to explore the world at my own pace is supported by the narrative and atmosphere, so it doesn't feel like some sort of compromise to my immersion if I spend an hour just sitting in front of the library thinking.

Same deal with BioShock, to a lesser extent: I felt pretty immersed in the world but was powerful enough so that (unlike in The Void) I felt safe in spending fifteen or twenty minutes just running around and looking at the scenery, trying to piece together exactly what happened and why.

Thanks for replying!

Your definition of exploration seems to be remarkably close to immersion if it is based on a relationship between the player/character and his environment (de-emphasising game mechanics in this regard).

That being said, my mind doesn't rest easy on it, possibly because it's shown me how narrow my own definition has been. I've never thought that sitting around for a long time, reading codex after codex (I'm playing Dragon Age at the moment), as a form of exploration, though I have no reason not to. Exploration for me has always been about going off the beaten track in-game, identifying the route that will progress the story and leaving it until last, in order to see and learn more about the world. Of course, this attitude can only be taken when I feel removed from any sense of urgency.

On the other hand, perhaps my consideration of immersion was inappropriate. Here we have two different methods of immersion, giving rise to two distinct feelings: the corridor scene of MGS4, and spending an hour in a library in Myst (if I understand correctly). Though one plunges you into a moment immanent in the plot and narrative, and the other allows you leisure to remove yourself and construct a picture of the world-at-large, both are equally valid, equally enjoyable and equally potent methods of immersion though they may differ in their approach.

In light of this, and having reevaluated my definition of exploration, I'd have to retract my previous claim! But two more questions:

Do you feel that difficulty in context of the totality of a game is a major factor of immersion? In other words, if The Void or the corridor of MGS4 were piss easy, would you have felt half as immersed in these games; similarly if they were impossible?

Given this, would you sacrifice your experience of The Void or Pathologic for an easy mode?

I think this speaks to the the psychological phenomenon of flow or being in the zone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)). An activity is most enjoyable when you are engaged at a level that keeps you optimally challenged, not so easy that your attention wanes, but not so hard that your flow is constantly interrupted. I think most games can be broken into 3 categories: bad games (a matter of taste), games that put you in the zone (an optimal level of enjoyment where self consciousness is lost), and games that deliberately or otherwise break your flow to make a statement, highlight a facet of the human condition, or just give you an obstacle so great that you are forced to learn or die.

There is room for each type of video game. But the difference between an immensely interactive experience such as a video game and something more passively experienced such as a movie or a piece of music, is that there is the element of patience that is more acutely tested.

So yes, the difficulty of each game is probably intertwined with the nature of your appreciation of the game. In one, the joy comes from the loss of self and the optimal level of challenge. In the other, the joy comes from the resolution of tension or the eradication of a period of frustration. My choice of game depends on the degree of patience I'm capable of at that particular time. Most of the time, I just like to be in state of flow.

I like games that actually present a challenge. Something to overcome. Not some stupid ass "experience" or "storyline" but an actual fucking video game with a start, middle, and finish. Consistent difficulty is even better.

Play bioshock on hard without any vita-chambers and you'll get pretty much what you are asking for